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Time, faster now!

June 16, 2010

Greetings,

The subtlest thing that rules our lives, the one that we all “Know” exists but cannot put a finger on, is Time. In Hindu mythology, Shiva, the Destroyer in the Trinity of Creator, Preserver, Destroyer is also known as MahaKaal.

Great Time (Maha=Great, Kaal=Unit of time). Time is the creator and destroyer. Time is relentless. Even the gods of old were subject to it. Notice the subtle hint there. Subject to time.

We can only be “sub”ject to that which is greater than us, above us. So time, in our reality, is supreme.

Time is the track, the string that connects birth to death. Time begins with the first breath, ends with the last. Hint there. Ponder it.

And it is such a relentless thing and has so many dimensions and facets and textures, yes? Sometimes it flies, sometimes it stands still. Dream-time, infinite, wake time finite. Flexible, like a rubber band, but relentless above all. Time marches on.

And it marks cycles. Existence is wheels within wheels within wheels of repeating cycles, each with their marker, time. 24 hours to a day, 60 minutes to the hour, 365 days to the year. Each planet beats out a different rhythm. Long and short.

We live on a being billions of years old. Feel that. I’m 45, a billion years is incomprehensible. As we reach farther and farther out, time dilates. Not literally, but figuratively. Galaxies and star systems forming in slow-motion glory. 100 earths will live and die and and far away somewhere, a galaxy will complete it’s birth pangs.

But come closer and closer and time contracts. Little creatures live for hours or days. Cells live and die and form by the millions in our body every second. At a microscopic level, a day is an eon. A second is a lifetime.

Time, undeniable, unknowable, mystery.

Is it really speeding up? Well, all time is perceived time. Excited? It flies. Bored? It crawls.

Harking back to the fractal nature of our world, rewind to 400o years ago. All time that anyone sensed then was a long time. Morning, afternoon, evening, night. 4 quarters, each with a unique texture. Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, that was the farmers clock.

As we have advanced, so has our measurement of time. Patterns of movement in the sky gave early astronomer/astrologers long cycles. Sun-dials gave people on the ground hourly markers.

Fast forward, the first pendulum. A new marker of time. Shorten the pendulum, time moved faster (well you measured it in smaller slices, at a perceptual level, it moved faster). Now, the clock wound around slowly, but the pendulum marked the seconds.

See where I’m taking this? Time was first something you lived “In”. But as it’s measure grew tighter, more precise, it became something you lived ‘By”.

All smart folks here, so I won’t belabour the point.

As we marked it tighter, our lives seemingly sped up. Chicken or egg, but the pace of life kept in lock-step with the extant measure of time pre-dominant .

Time and it’s instruments became crucial to every sphere of life. Soon, time was on our wrists. Constant. Tick-tick…. it worked itself into our consciousness in a way that soon got us obsessed with it.

The first clocks were noisy too. If we could not see it, we could always hear it ticking away. And hour markers and alarms…. time has been an ever more intrusive presence in our lives. And then, we began to slice it into smaller an smaller pieces. Milli second, micro-second, pico-second, nano-second.

The slicing of time made faster and faster machines possible. Everything after is controlled by time. Now time is everywhere, on our wrists, on our phones, on our desktops, on our bed-side tables, on our churches, on flashing bill-boards.

And our lives are sped up ever more. What a strange correlation, if you really think about it eh? The shorter the period we measured time, the faster the pace of our lives got.

Now, we measure pico-second intervals and live nano-second lives. Short little spans of attention. Always looking forward, trying to catch up with tomorrow, a constant race against time. And time, the trickester, sits in our machines of convenience and control, blazing away at tera-flops and giga-flops, happy to help us speed along.

Time marks the pace of our existence. It lives in us, in our breath and our heartbeat. Slow down the breath, slow down time. It’s really that simple.

Stop and time obliges by stopping right there with you. Relax and time relaxes too.

What if mind is breath?
Can you think straight when breathing really fast?
Does mind go on after the final breath?
Maybe breath is time.
Like breath, time also has an intake and and out-flow. Systolic/diastolic.
And so on….
What say?

look ORI, time stamps on everything, including the Reply. why is that necessary? you designed it. i use to race against the clock. crazy to relate to it today. man against the clock, being a racer of everything that i did. how fast was I. i trained all day for hours and hours, and would calculate my miles. add them all up. had to be able to cycle a hundred miles under a certain time to win. god was i fooled. oh well, good thing today i recognize myself. i hate it when someone leaves me a message on my phone and tells me what damn time it is, right down to the second. people are very strange.

Time as we know it on a clock, calendar, or just waiting for the money shot in a Sofia Vergara movie,—- that “Time” doesn’t exist, anymore than the sun rises, or using Hero as a name for a brave self-sacrificing individual.

We can peg a past event by using a practical convenience, like “Time”, so that we can all refer to the same period when it happened, but where is it this “Time”?

What time really is instead is EVENTS. You wake, you sleep, you eat, work, play, blog. But time has nothing to do with it. The earth quakes, the tsunamis come, the dunes come and go. All happening with no regard to “time”. Time is a myth.

Not a bad read if you like poetry. It is magnificent bullshit, though. Our perception of time changes as we age. Each year is, proportionally, a smaller fraction of our whole life. That is why a year felt much longer to you at age 6 than it does as an adult. If you lived to be a million years old, a year would feel like 30 minutes. People would be born and die in a couple of days (in your perception).

A note about comments

Greetings. This being a place to primarily exchange ideas, I thought I'd share a few pointers for comments, which in my mind would result in a healthy exchange of ideas.
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Appreciate the understanding and against censorship.
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